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The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

politiken.dk

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Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#41

Post by ryanackley »

adrian_b wrote: post #28
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #12

I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed. What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can b…

I do not care whether LibreOffice looks ugly or not. What I care is that the documents that I generate with LibreOffice look beautiful and that depends on me choosing beautiful high-quality typefaces (not the default ugly typefaces of LibreOffice) and on choosing adequate formatting of the documents. All that LibreOffice has to do is provide adequate support for all OpenType features and for all formatting options th…

I'm no Microsoft fanboy but LibreOffice is hideous and the compatibility has not kept up even after the MS Office formats moved to xml. Also, most of my interactions with Office Documents nowadays are through the online tools. I don't even have to install a binary on my computer anymore.

These enterprises should invest a fraction of what they used to spend on Microsoft Office into a development effort to modernize LibreOffice. Last time I tried to use it, it seemed like it was on life support in relation to Microsoft Office.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#42

Post by simion314 »

NexRebular wrote: post #19
decide1000 wrote: post #9

I hope this sets an example for the rest of Europe! Great news.

Linux monoculturalization is not great news. We should deploy e.g. *BSD and illumos as well to prevent having all eggs in one basket.

I think the user space apps will mostly work on BSD, so if somehow in future a BSD distro will be superior to Linux should be easy to move the apps over. I do not think there will be a lot of work put in the Linux kernel and I think KDE still works on BSDs

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#43

Post by baobun »

Arch-TK wrote: post #35

You know, I really do think governments should not be paying into Microsoft's bank accounts. But thinking about this from another perspective, if I was hired as a programmer at a company and told I could use vim on i3 on some Linux distro and then suddenly the company decided that everyone would be switched over to windows machines and forced to use VSCode then I would be rightfully pissed. Just like someone hired to…

Mandating open and interoperable formats would be a good start. Moving off for a department becomes much less of a shift if it doesn't require coordination with everyone you might exchange files with.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#44

Post by piker »

Somebody tell the Danish legal team that Tritium (https://tritium.legal) runs on Linux :).

Politics aside, Microsoft has such a strangle hold on so many industries it's insane. That reach is just extending with copilot + OpenAI and Azure. The next few years could be bleak if it plays the way MSFT is trying to push it. Good for Denmark.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#45

Post by adrian_b »

user____name wrote: post #21

I recently tried a bunch of Office packages and was surprised by just how bad they've gotten over the years. It just feels like a downgrade from what we had in prior decades. Especially LibreOffice just had the most abysmal performance imaginable. The older versions were much better in my experience.

These might depend on some options chosen by whatever Linux distribution you have used.

As always, the behavior seen on some Linux distribution for some application may not match at all the experience on other distributions.

I always compile LibreOffice from sources (in Gentoo) and I have not noticed any performance problems, and most of my text documents or spreadsheets are quite large. It is true that currently I use it only on decent computers, but in the past I have used it even on several generations of Atom CPUs, from Pineview to Gemini Lake. Even on those there were no performance problems, at least not with Writer and Calc.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#46

Post by aquariusDue »

NexRebular wrote: post #19
decide1000 wrote: post #9

I hope this sets an example for the rest of Europe! Great news.

Linux monoculturalization is not great news. We should deploy e.g. *BSD and illumos as well to prevent having all eggs in one basket.

I'm gonna do my part and champion Haiku OS instead.

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#48

Post by jhoho »

ktallett wrote: post #14
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #12

I used to love LibreOffice when it was OpenOffice.org. When it got unshackled from Oracle, it somehow became kinda uglier, and unfortunately it wasn't able to keep up with the times technology-wise, as all efforts to make it online are a failure of usability and speed. What we, the humanity, need, is a free-as-in-freedom open source set of web applications that work like Google Docs / Spreadsheets / Slides, but can b…

I found onlyoffice a good replacement. It is certainly better looking.

It's really beautiful but I stopped using it because of its opaque ties with Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice#Organization

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#49

Post by netsharc »

amiga386 wrote: post #37
madduci wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in Germany

The answer is, sadly, still more political than technical. Munich moved to Linux in 2004 and was mostly complete by 2013. Then Microsoft turned up the charm, and moved its headquarters in Germany to Munich, and Munich decided in 2017 to switch back to Windows by 2020: https://fsfe.org/news/2017/news-20170301-01.html But then different politicians were elected, and in 2020 it decided to switch back to Linux again: htt…

Ha, can a city run with a dual-booting system? /s

Re: The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice

#50

Post by neepi »

worthless-trash wrote: post #38
neepi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the standard voice of someone who's never had to deal with a badly maintained or managed open source product or an asshole maintainer or had to run a fork for 6 years because no one will merge a trivial fix in. Or had a LibreOffice bug open for a decade. Yeah I can really get in there and spend 2 years ripping the horrible UI out, then have to run a fork because it's not of interest to the maintainers and wil…

But you can't fix that one either.

I haven't found anything that needs fixing.
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